This invention generally to the storage, management and sharing of data or content in enterprises and other large organizations.
Enterprises and other large organizations create, store and manage large amounts of data, frequently in a collaborative workflow environment, where the data must be created, managed, shared and used by different clients (end-users) of the enterprise. The data is typically stored, organized in and accessed from a centralized facility such as an enterprise data center or remotely from cloud storage. To facilitate content management and sharing, enterprises and organizations provide tools and capabilities such as content management systems (CMSs) tailored to manage, store and deliver content to internal organizations, users, and processes. Content management systems may be used to store and organize files, enforce access and security restrictions, and provide other functionality such as version control, indexing, searching and retrieval.
In a typical enterprise CMS, content is transferred from data storage by a content server (CS) to requesting end user client computers, and the data transfer is facilitated by an orchestration server (OS) acting as an orchestrator for operations on metadata and content. Frequently multiple users need to access and/or share the same content, especially in collaborative work environments, and frequently the shared content is quite voluminous, such as video or audio files, for instance. Thus, data transfer (download) of content from the data store to a requesting client and upload of any modified or changed content back to the data store may require significant resources and be very time-consuming. This can slow down enterprise operations when competing users and processes must access and share the same or other content. Sync-n-share systems where stored files are accessed, changed, synchronized and shared by multiple clients have similar problems as CMS systems.
It is desirable to provide content sharing systems and methods in CMS and sync-n-share systems, particularly for enterprises and other large organizations, that address the foregoing and other known problems of managing and sharing stored content in collaborative working environments by providing efficient mechanisms for accessing, sharing and managing such content. It is to these ends that the present invention is directed.